1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automated gemstone evaluation system and method for producing an automated gemstone evaluation report.
2. Description of the Related Art
As is the case for many unique or one of a kind items, individual gemstones, like houses, art, and used cars, can be difficult to determine the characteristics of quality to arrive at a fair market value. In many cases the only way to determine the fair market value of these types of items, is to determine what similar items have recently sold for. In addition to being able to identify similar items, which have been recently sold, one would also need to understand how the present item compares to the recently sold items, so as to be able to develop a reasonable approximation of the present item's fair market value. Analysis of this type typically requires a fair amount of experience and knowledge about a particular product's characteristics of quality and the market for that product.
However, for items like gemstones, many consumers do not buy and sell such items on a regular enough basis to develop the level of experience necessary to be able to approximate, with any degree of certainty, the values of the various gemstones they may see. Therefore they will often make an uninformed decision or will make use of an appraiser, who specializes in the valuation of items for a particular market.
For many of the gemstones being sold, the gemstone industry does provide a degree of objectivity to the gemstone buying process in the form of laboratory certificates. The laboratory certificates provide objective information specific to a particular gemstone, such as cut type, dimensions, weight, color and clarity. While the laboratory certificates help identify and rate various objective criteria, the typical consumer still does not have the requisite knowledge and experience to interpret the information, so as to evaluate the various gemstones. However a skilled appraiser can often times use the report to approximate a value for the gemstone without ever physically seeing the gemstone.
The appraiser further has available industry pricing reports, which provide close approximation pricing. The same industry pricing reports are often made reference to, by gemstone dealers, for a price reference point, during negotiations, when buying or selling gemstones with other gemstone dealers. However the industry pricing reports typically only provide a starting price point, and only take into consideration a subset of the objective criteria available from the various laboratory certificates. Furthermore, the objective criteria not taken into consideration by the industry pricing reports, unfortunately, often can and will have an impact on the fair market price, and need to be accounted for by the appraiser.
When shopping for a gemstone, like a diamond, it is not uncommon for a consumer to go to twenty or more jewelers and look at approximately five diamonds per jeweler. In a case such as this, the consumer can be comparing one hundred or more diamonds. If the consumer wants to determine the relative quality analysis and average buying price of all one hundred diamonds, the consumer would need to obtain one hundred evaluations.
Currently, for the typical consumer to obtain 100 evaluations, the consumer would obtain the services of a gemologist appraiser. The appraiser would manually review and analyze each gemstone, separately, and generate an evaluation for each gemstone for relative quality analysis and average buying price estimate. For a large number of gemstones this process of review can be very time consuming and expensive. Therefore it would be beneficial to develop an automated evaluation system, that is readily available to the general consumer, which takes into account additional objective data, which can affect the value of the gemstone, that the industry pricing reports do not take into account, and which the consumer does not understand how to correlate into the analysis process.